Wednesday, January 28, 2015

ECW's new Pop Classics series is another in the vogue-ish vein of ultra-mini pop culture lines like Continuum's 33 1/3 books, Wallflower Press' Cultographies, and Auteur's Devil's Advocates. Unlike those lines that specifically home in on albums, cult movies, and horror movies, respectively, Pop Classics is broader in its focus, its first titles covering comics (Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles), cult feature films (Showgirls), and cult TV. The first title devoted to the latter is Andy Burns's Wrapped in Plastic: Twin Peaks. The timing for this book may seem perfect since there's so much resumed interest in David Lynch and Mark Frost's groundbreaking series amidst a recent high-profile blu-ray release, and more improbably, the announcement that season three is in the works, but it's actually slightly unfortunate since that resumed interest means a new flood of very in-depth writing about the series, best exemplified by Brad Dukes's superb Reflections: An Oral History of Twin Peaks.

In contrast, Burns's book is a pretty basic, 100-page introduction to the series that probably won't teach hardcore "Peaks" fans much they don't already know. He covers the basic genesis of the series and how it broke conventions of Network TV storytelling and how its aftershocks can be felt in series from "Northern Exposure" and "Picket Fences" through "Psych" and "Hannibal". There are some interesting tidbits that come through in the interviews Burns conducted with alumni such as actor Dana Ashbrook (who gives some fascinating background on Bobby Briggs's poignant conversation with father Major Briggs in the season two premier), actress Kimmy Robertson (who provides some extra details about what went wrong with the Uli Edel-directed episode), and Secret Diary of Laura Palmer-scribe Jennifer Lynch (who offers a very interesting interpretation of BOB's possession of Leland Palmer). Burns also deserves credit for reserving several of his scant pages to exploring how the series dealt with incest. Overall, though, Wrapped in Plastic is really a primer for brand new fans. Fortunately, with the release of that blu-ray and the announcement of season three, there should be plenty of those.

Tuesday, January 27, 2015

Woody Allen’s bad personal choices had at least one major
artistic ramification: he could no longer collaborate with Mia Farrow. The Purple Rose of Cairo might have been
filed with his relatively minor films if not for her (though, to be fair, her
presence didn’t rescue Broadway Danny
Rose or Alice from that file).
Her performance as Cecilia, a Depression-era victim of domestic abuse who finds
solace escaping into movies—or specifically, one particular movie called The Purple Rose of Cairo—elevates the
film of the same name to one of Allen’s very best.

The magical conceit is that the movie ends up escaping into
Cecilia’s world when minor character Tom Baxter (Jeff Daniels) takes notice of
the woman who keeps coming to see his movie and decides to step off the screen
to be with her. The brilliance of the conceit is that there is no question
about whether or not this is Cecilia’s fantasy; it is not and we see the
hilarious ways the film’s other characters (who, we are told, are not human),
producers, and audiences deal with Baxter’s strange leap. Meanwhile, the
character expects the real world to function as smoothly as the movies. He’s
baffled when he tries to escape from a restaurant where he tried to pay for
dinner with phony movie money by getting behind the wheel of a random car that
does not automatically start up as soon as he presses the gas.

This is basically Woody Allen’s take on the popular eighties
trope of an alien falling in love with a normal person (see Starman, Splash, E.T., etc.), and
it plays out with the director’s signature pathos, humor, and honesty—he may love those old Hollywood movies as much as Cecilia does, but like her he ultimately refuses to accept escapism as a viable way to live. Yet it is Farrow who truly sells the conceit with Cecilia’s
wide-eyed openness, infectious love of the movies, and underlying sadness. Annie Hall may be Allen’s best movie,
and Bananas may be his funniest, but The Purple Rose of Cairo is my favorite.
It comes to blu-ray from Twilight Time, though the film’s soft, sepia aesthetic
is not the greatest for showcasing the wonders of hi-def. Still, the disc looks
true to the film and is only occasionally invaded by a white speck or two. As
usual for Twilight Time, there is an isolated music score track, and as usual
for a Woody Allen home video, there are no other extras.

Sunday, January 25, 2015

Francois Truffaut was one of cinema’s key filmmakers and one
of its key students and critics. He had already showed off that first hat with The 400 Blows, Shoot the Piano Player, Jules
and Jim, and Fahrenheit 451 and
the second and third ones with his work for Cahiers
du Cinema, in which he posited the auteur theory, by the time he made The Bride Wore Black in 1967. Here
Truffaut’s art and his obsession with the art of another—namely Alfred
Hitchcock—gel in a film that begins as winking homage before developing into
something more personal.

When The Bride Wore
Black (based on a novel by William Irish, who also wrote “It Had to Be
Murder”, which Hitch adapted into Rear
Window) begins by showing generally mundane images set to Bernard Herrmann’s overwhelming
and overwhelmingly recognizable score, it’s as if
Truffaut is trying to shove a signifier of Hitchcock’s most melodramatic scenes
into scenes nearly devoid of melodrama despite the fact that the woman on
screen tries to kill herself at one point.

That woman is Julie Kohler (Jeanne Moreau), who soon sets
about her own obsessive mission by insinuating herself into the lives of
various men and killing them. Her motive remains a mystery for a quarter of the
film, but since the title of the movie is The
Bride Wore Black, I don’t feel like I’m spoiling too much by saying she’s
on a mission of revenge against the creeps she blames for her groom’s death.

While Truffaut seems to drop clues about his movies’ apparent
main influence (we see such locations of iconic Hitchcock scenes as a
schoolyard, a speeding train, and a concert hall), Julie differs from the mass
of Hitch’s charming main characters because she is a husk (it is telling that
she shares a surname with the similarly emotion-drained title character of Shoot thePiano Player). She carries on with her grim mission devoid of
emotion, something that could not be said of even sketchy characters like
Norman Bates and Marnie Edgar. This means The
Bride Wore Black is not as fun to watch as your average Hitchcock movie,
but maybe revenge, murder, and soul-destroying grief are not supposed to be fun
(or maybe they are—just see how Quentin Tarantino reshaped this movie’s premise
into Kill Bill). It is, however, a
suspense film worthy of the master when obstacles such as an unexpected visit
from a redheaded model, a sweet little boy, and even the possibility that she
may have found a new love fall into Julie’s vengeful path. These are the film’s
most powerful moments.

I’ve been wanting to see The
Bride Wore Black ever since I saw Kill
Bill ten years ago. It’s finally available on blu-ray via Twilight Time,
and in a beautiful transfer with strong blacks, strong color (though this is not
a strikingly colorful movie), and strong grain. Supplementing the film
(presented in both subtitled and English dubbed versions—the dubbed one
contains different musical cues) is a commentary by film historians Julie Kirgo
and Nick Redman and Herrmann biographer Steven C. Smith. Smith’s presence puts a
lot of the focus on the score, and he discusses the clashes between Hermann and
Truffaut over the director’s choices in this film—as well as Herrmann’s clashed
with Hitchcock. Kirgo tries to pull the focus away from Hitchcock, whose
influence she does not see as strongly in the film as a lot of other commentators
do, and discusses the more meaningful role gender dynamics play in the film. There
is also a supplementary CD featuring a 79-minute interview with Bernard Herrmann
that spotlights the composer’s short temper. The blu-ray disc’s isolated score
track spotlights his art.

Perhaps you know him as Sean Todd, or more fittingly,
Dementia or Grisly, but no matter what name he drew under, Tom Sutton was at
the forefront of seventies horror comics largely because of his black and white
work on Vampirella. Yoe Books/IDW’s
new anthology, Tom Sutton’s Creepy Things,
mostly focuses on his color work for titles such as Ghostly Haunts, Haunted, Ghost Manor, Midnight Tales, Haunted Love,
and yes, Creepy Things (oddly the
source of only one story in this collection). As it turns out, Sutton’s work
was just as effectively goopy and kooky in color as it was in black and white.
His style, which takes Graham Ingels’s signature ooze to nearly abstract
levels, always works best when he was rendering ghouls, corpses, and creeps.
His humans, particularly the ones he intended to look attractive, are often
awkwardly drawn, sometimes distorted. This might not necessarily be a flaw
though, as it leaves even his most “normal” panels looking unsettlingly
abnormal. And Sutton had little patience for normality. Although he didn’t write
everything in Tom Sutton’s Creepy Things,
each of its stories reflects his innate weirdness. The book collects a nutso
tale about a murderous teddy bear, one written from the grave’s point of view
(and featuring some of the finest art in this book), one about the ghost of a
hypocritical temperance advocate who finds himself a new drinking buddy, a nonsensical monster rally intent on cramming in references to every classic movie and literary monster you can think of, and a
twisted twist on Richard Matheson’s “Twilight Zone” episode, “A World of His
Own”. The book gets even weirder when Sutton works outside of the horror genre on
the sci-fi fantasy “Lost in Transit”, the prehistoric sci-fi sci-fi fantasy “Goo”, the time-hopping sword-and-sandal
fantasy “Journey to Lost Orlaak”, the hilarious fairy tale “The Tower Maiden”, and the adventure yarn “The Kukulkaton”, starring a sleazy, racist proto-Indiana Jones. In the final tale, “Through a Glass Darkly”, Sutton’s psychedelic B&W art and metaphysical, Lovecraftian storytelling are nothing short of sublime. All of this makes for one of Yoe/IDW’s very best anthologies yet.

Friday, January 16, 2015

In 1940, Theodore Sturgeon published an atmospheric, highly
unsettling story about a murderous mass of swamp vegetation called “It” in Unknown magazine. Sturgeon’s career
would continue to blossom, adding such achievements as the script for the
classic “Star Trek” episode “Amok Time” and inspiring Kurt Vonnegut’s Kilgore
Trout to his résumé. The
swamp creature would go on to have an even more flourishing life. Shortly after
the publication of “It”, The Heap oozed across patriotic Airboy comics. In
the sixties, seventies, and eighties, muck monsters like the Lurker in the
Swamp, Bog Beast, Marvin the Dead-Thing, Man-Thing, a revived Heap, and
especially, Swamp Thing were sprouting up in every comic brand worth its salt.

Swampmen:
Muck-Monsters and Their Makers!, the sixth installment of The Comic Book
Creator series, doesn’t get too deeply into why swamp monsters caught on the
way they did (I think it has to do with both our fear of primordial swamp
environments and the way such isolated places serve as pathways to exploring
our own feelings of isolation), but it doesn’t skimp on anything else about
these unique creatures. This text-thick, completely illustrated edition features
a detailed and critical timeline of muck monsters in the comics, full-color
pin-ups, the full text of Sturgeon’s “It”, biographies of the half-dozen-or-so major muckers, and a series of
very in-depth interviews with monster makers such as Len Wein, Alan Moore, and
Bernie Wrightson (Swamp Thing), Steve
Gerber and Val Mayerik (The Man-Thing).
Rather than being mere page-filler, these interviews are consistently
fascinating, whether Wein offers his brief but thought-provoking take on the
appeal of swamp monsters, Wrightson gets into his Monster Kid childhood, or
Moore waxes philosophical about his Swamp
Thing contributions and handles some no-punches-pulled questions graciously (although it is off topic, I was hoping he’d discuss The Killing Joke a bit too, but he doesn’t). While Swampmen
doesn’t hesitate to take its bizarre topic seriously, there is almost always a
sense of fun purveying this colorful, informative, artful, and intelligent
volume.

Wednesday, January 14, 2015

The title of Andrew Grant Jackson’s new book, 1965: The Most Revolutionary Year in Music,
made my eyebrows rise. Really? 1965? Sure, it was the year Dylan went electric
and the Stones lamented their lack of satisfaction, but wouldn’t 1968—the year
of “Say It Loud, I’m Black and I’m Proud”, “Street Fighting Man”, Electric Ladyland, the formation of Led
Zeppelin, the release of the first LP-length rock opera (S.F. Sorrow), and well, “Revolution” — be more apt? Or how about
1967, the year of Sgt. Pepper’s, The Velvet Underground & Nico, the
Summer of Love, Monterey Pop, Motown going psychedelic, and Paul McCartney
going on TV to say he’s done acid? Or maybe even 1966 with its Revolver and Pet Sounds and Blonde on
Blonde and Aftermath.

The thing is, all of those things are the products of
revolution, but not necessarily revolutionary in and of themselves. The major
upheavals that made them possible really did happen in 1965. It wasn’t just the
year Dylan plugged in and the Stones got topical. It was the year George
Harrison picked up the sitar and John Lennon got personal. It was when Brian
Wilson expanded The Beach Boys sound after quitting the road a week before the
year began. It was the year he and John and George and Ringo and Keith and
Brian took their first acid doses. It was when James Brown invented funk, when
jazz got free, when Charlie Pride opened up the palette of country, when Pete
Townshend took a stand for his g-g-generation, when Ginsberg planted the seeds
of flower power, when The Velvet Underground hooked up with Nico and Warhol, when Otis broke out, when The
Byrds married folk and rock, and such efforts contributed to such wider
revolutionary actions as the Civil Rights Movement, anti-war protests... even
the rise of gay rights and women’s liberation.

By covering the year in all its complicated, colorful,
violent, genre-hopping, debauched madness, Jackson does a pretty damn good job
of making his case that 1965 was, indeed, music’s most revolutionary year. He
does so with lyricism and political astuteness while also maintaining an
authoritative journalistic voice. Grant didn’t need to get heated up to get me
heated up about the injustices rampant in that year: LBJ’s escalation of the
Vietnam war, the abject institutional and grass-roots racism that caused black
communities to declare war, and the more modest outrages of conservative
assholes harassing guys with long hair (the writer recounts the tale of young
Mitt Romney and his idiot buddies ganging up on one poor kid to forcibly sheer
his hair—an act the guy who could have been president shrugged off as a
“prank”). This is a powerful book because a lot of powerful things happened in
1965. A look at any current newspaper reveals how much we’ve progressed beyond
that seemingly remote era and how little has really changed.

My only wish is that Jackson’s doesn’t let it be with
’65.He may prove that ’66, ’67,
’68, and beyond weren’t as revolutionary, but I would still love to see him
peer into those years too. It would make one revolutionary series.

Thursday, January 8, 2015

Howard Nostrand brought artistry to non-E.C. horror comics
like Chamber of Chills and Witches Tales by consciously copying
E.C.’s greatest artist, Jack Davis. The approach was contrived, but it worked
because Nostrand’s stories were utterly bizarre in ways that E.C.’s often-formulaic
morality and thing-rises-from-the-grave tales rarely were. There is a child’s
rambling logic to things like “Zodiac”, in which a pair of astrologers conjure
zodiac icons to do their evil bidding, “Search for Evil”, in which a Crypt
Keeper lookalike brings a mad scientist’s “see no evil, hear no evil” monkey
statues to life to procure victims for his experiments, and “TerrorVision”, in
which a space octopus forces some dudes to build a TV. In pieces such as the corpse-narrated
“The Lonely” he approached E.C.’s yucky gruesomeness and did the same for its intelligence
and humor with the vampire-narrated “I, Vampire” (while also using vamps as
metaphors for prejudice half-a-century before “True Blood”).

And as much as artists Sid Jacobson and Craig Yoe underline
Davis’s influence in their introductory essays to the new anthology Howard Nostrand’s Nightmares, Nostrand
had an eye for detail that was all his own. Marvel at the intricacy of the
opening splash panel of “The Rift of the Maggis” before guffawing at the
gleeful nastiness of the story that follows. And when Nostrand out-and-out rips
off E.C., as he does when employing that comics’ trademark first-person pov device
or redrawing its most famous character in “Zodiac”, you at least have to admit
that the guy was smart enough to steal from the very best.

Wednesday, January 7, 2015

The pop landscape had changed radically in the ten years
leading up to 1976. With albums such as Revolver
and Sgt. Pepper’s, The Beatles
had officially done away with the single as pop’s primary medium, ushering in
an era of often overly-serious long players, possibly elevating pop to
high-art, possibly helping to erase some of its intrinsic fun. We all know what
happened in the seventies with the rise of progressive rock, that favorite
bugaboo of rock and roll purists. While I believe the ill effects and, well,
crappiness of prog have been highly exaggerated (and I’ll admit, it has often
been exaggerated by me here on Psychobabble for no other reason than making fun
of prog— quite a bit of which I really dig— is fun), I also believe pop really
did need a high colonic around ’76.

It got that with two major events: the arrival of
calculatedly “dumb” punk rock and an even more calculating new record label
that consciously established itself as everything mainstream rock no longer
was. Founded by brilliant iconoclasts/wise asses Dave Robinson and Jake
Riviera, Stiff Records took a great, big whiz on the seriousness and
ponderousness of current rock by returning the focus to singles with humor that
might have made Rick Wakeman hide under his spangled cape. This was the label
that had the great bolshie yarblockos to adopt “The King Is Dead, Long Live the
King!” as a slogan promoting Elvis Costello mere days after Presley bit the
dust. Less controversially they issued an LP called The Wit and Wisdom of Ronald Reagan, which naturally contained forty minutes of total silence. Robinson and Riviera were also reverent record lovers who understood that
their fellow geeks would drool over limited edition, colored vinyl, ingeniously
designed (most notably by legendary house artist Barney Bubbles) packages.
Every indie label worth its salt followed suit.

Robinson and Riviera knew well the benefits of publicity bad
and good, but they also knew that artists who don’t don superhero costumes and
play half-hour Hammond organ solos need nurturing and exposure too. Thus, Stiff
became home to some of the best and truest artists of late-seventies/early
eighties pop— Costello, Nick Lowe, The Damned, Madness, Lene Lovich, The
Adverts, Devo, etc.—if only before they passed on to bigger labels.

Richard Balls’s new book Be
Stiff: The Stiff Records Story is half great because it serves as a series of biographies outlining
the early careers of such significant artists and half great because it’s so
fun to read about all the outrageousness of and
surrounding Stiff. One of the book’s weirdest tales involves Virgin Records
founder Richard Branson getting Devo baked so he could ambush them with a surprise
request from Johnny Rotten. One of its funniest involves Rod Stewart sabotaging
Lou Reed on Ian Dury’s behalf. Perhaps its most shocking revelation is
recording engineer Bazza’s declaration that The Damned recorded their anarchic
debut album as “well behaved young gentleman.” Now that’s outrageous!

The 1920s and 1930s were watershed years for horror cinema
as they were for all cinema. The twenties saw silent horror rise around the
world with abandoned artistry. The thirties saw the genre’s tropes come into
focus at Hollywood’s Universal Studios. That decade’s horror explosion turned
to an implosion with the arrival of World War II’s very real horrors and the
MPAA’s censorship crackdowns. This left forties horror seemingly out of focus
with its plethora of relatively benign sequels, “Poverty Row” cheapies, and
hard-to-categorize realistic pictures residing in the twilight zone between
horror and noir. The apparent lack of full-blooded, truly artistic horror
cinema during the forties often leaves the genre getting a bad critical rep—or
even ignored—in discussions of horror and forties cinema.

Recovering1940s Horror Cinema: Traces of a Lost Decade
collects seventeen new essays that reevaluate a period too often maligned or
shrugged off. What the writers uncover might cause horror fans to rethink both
the standing of our favorite genre during the forties and what constitutes a
horror picture. Writer Kristopher Woolfer acknowledges the blurriness of this
period by noting how, in the forties, horror as pulpy as House of Dracula had become more reality based— with its vampire
and werewolf seeking scientific cures for their monstrousness— and how drama as
reality-based as the pseudo bio-pic Citizen
Kane borrowed Gothic horror tropes liberally. Peter Marra further forces us
to rethink how horror hid in the forties by designating Bluebeard, The Lodger, Hangover Square, The Leopard Man, and The
Spiral Staircase as proto-slasher pictures—right down to their sexually
motivated killings— released decades before the usually identified year-zero
pictures, Psycho and Peeping Tom. Meanwhile, filmmaker Anne
Golden acknowledges that a movie such as The
Spiral Staircase does not have to adhere to a single genre, and can exist
just as reasonably in the shadows of horror as it can in those of the
avant-garde. Even more fascinatingly, Ian Olney locates a previously hidden
stream of proto-feminist horror pictures during the era (while cheating a bit
by bleeding into the fifties). Mario DeGiglio-Bellemare argues that The Body Snatcher contradicts Val
Lewton’s reputation for overly restrained “horror of the unseen” pictures with
one that he sees as falling in line with the Grand-Guignol tradition (the
writer avoids discussing the graphic gore for which the theater is best known
since Lewton’s production obviously has none of that). Mark Janovich tries to boost
the reputation of forties horror by calling attention to the work of two of
Hollywood’s biggest icons—Humphrey Bogart and Edward G. Robinson—in the genre.

This book lacks a serious reevaluation of Universal’s
horrors of the forties, which included enough unfairly over looked pictures—The Mummy’s Hand, Frankenstein Meets the Wolfman, House of Frankenstein—to warrant
their own explorations. Too often, Universal’s movies cast in minor comparative
roles throughout these pieces. But perhaps Universal’s horrors have been
handled as a whole enough times that this gap is excusable. Meanwhile, some of
the best horrors of this period—Dead of Night and The
Uninvited, to name a couple—are never even mentioned. That is more than a
little curious, but even without such key pictures, these essays still manage
to reveal how varied, evolving, influential, and present horror remained in
this so-called “lost decade.” As should be expected of a book of this sort, a
couple writers (Woolfer, Cory Legassic) bury their arguments beneath a slag heap of academic jargon , but the vast majority of these essays are as lucid and pleasurable to
read as they are thought provoking… and Kier-La Janisse’s study of the appeal
of the horror comedies of the East End Kids for real kids is downright fun.

Get Recovering1940s Horror Cinema: Traces of a Lost Decade
on Amazon.com here:

Tuesday, January 6, 2015

Garage rock aficionados know The Mascots because of “Words
Enough to Tell You”, a romantic jangler that earned a spot on Rhino’s Nuggets II: Original
Artyfacts from the British Empire and Beyondbox set. Aside from
that one track, they’re pretty obscure outside of Sweden, apparently because
they weren’t too concerned about international success. At home, they were
considered a Scandinavian Beatles, though The Zombies seemed to have had an
equally heavy influence on the band. Their debut album, Your Mascots, blended the Fabs’ buoyancy with The Zombies’
sullenness for a sound a lot like the early Beau Brummels. They were actually darker
than any of those groups. Even Lennon hadn’t written anything as nasty as “I
hope that this is forever goodbye / I hope that you forever will die”
(“Goodbye”) at this point in his career (though he would pretty soon with “Run
for Your Life”) and Harrison never sounded as dour as The Mascots do on the
pitch-black “For Him”. On a version of Chuck Berry’s “Too Much Monkey Business” sung with
the blinding speed of the guy from the Micro Machines commercials, The Mascots
just sound crazy. All of this makes for one of the most interesting
pseudo-Mersey Beat records of 1965.

The following year, The Mascots released their most enduring
hit (which they released on flexi disc with a popular magazine after winning a
contest!) and their second and final album. Elpee
is even better than Your Mascots,
kind of a distillation of everything that was awesome about mid-sixties pop.
Along with the old Beatles/Zombies influence are chunks of The Who (the
record’s most pervasive touchstone), Yardbirds (the killer single “I Want to
Live”), Unit 4 Plus 2 (“Droopy Drops”), Dylan by way of The Kinks (“This Proud
Crowd”), Kinks by way of The Kinks (“Nobody Crying”), and The Lovin’ Spoonful (“Things Are Turning Out”). This is a heavier,
noisier, more eclectic outing than the first one, and The Mascots deliver
pretty consistently great original material (the poorly sung and only mildly amusing “I Don’t Like You” is the odd exception).

The Mascots’ story on 45 was a different story at this
point. Their Zombies (“Woman”), Who (“So Sad About Us”), Peter, Paul, and Mary
(“Stewball”), Paul Revere and the Raiders (“Moreen”), and Dylan (“You Ain’t
Going Nowhere”) covers were all well done and never lazy copies of the originals,
but such over-reliance on others’ material revealed a definite creative
fatigue. The original “Baby, You’re So Wrong” was a rare standout in those
later years.

Nevertheless, The Mascots made a lot of great recordings, so
they’re definitely due a more thorough overview than one song on a various
artists box set. RPM International Records is giving them that now with
expanded editions of Your Mascots and
Ellpee, both being released outside of
Sweden for the very first time. Both discs (Ellpee
is a double) come with all of those single sides great (“Words Enough to Tell
You”; “I Like My Bike”, a 1964 A-side that presaged acid-era whimsy) and not so
great (“Lessen”, a terrifying ball of corn that indicates what the band might
have sounded like had they never discovered British bands; Mason Williams’s
pedestrian folk “If I Had a Ship”, here in English and Swedish). Fortunately,
the good way outweighs the bad, and power pop freaks will find a ton to dig on Your Mascots and Ellpee. Get them on Amazon.com here:

1966 was the first year The Beatles released only one LP. Since
Revolver came out in mid-summer, this
meant there’d be no new Beatles product for the Holiday spending season for the
first time since With The Beatles
appeared in November 1963. Parlophone took care of this by issuing the UK’s first
official Beatles compilation, A
Collection of Beatles Oldies. International comps would not appear until
1973 with the releases of two double-albums devoted to the 1962-1966 and
1967-1970 eras. Although Allen Klein compiled the so-called “Red” and “Blue” albums
as counterattacks against an unsanctioned As-Seen-on-TV collection called Alpha Omega, they have become integral
components of The Beatles’ discography. A lot of future Beatlemaniacs (such as
your humble narrator) cut their teeth on these four records and went on to pick
up everything else the band put out, both because they highlighted the high
quality that surely lurked in every groove on every proper Beatles record and
because they had so many gaps. The songs I knew from regular radio rotation
that weren’t on 1962-1966 (“Twist and
Shout”, “Good Day Sunshine”, “Do You Want to Know a Secret”, “I Saw Her
Standing There”, “Got to Get You Into My Life”, “I’m a Loser”, “I Should Have
Known Better”) or 1967-1970 (“When
I’m 64”… ummm, there were way fewer of them on the second collection) forced me
to hunt down A Hard Day’s Night and The Early Beatles and Revolver and Sgt. Pepper’s, and I am forever grateful to Allen Klein for that (and
only that) reason.

Even with the whole Beatles collection in hand, these first
two major compilations are still great listens for those rare days when I just
hanker for the hits. No, they are not perfect. Why is nearly half of Rubber Soul on the first collection but there
are only two tracks from the superior Revolver?
Why was that awful, echo-saturated version of “I Feel Fine” included on 1962–1966?Why weren’t there any liner notes?

Capitol/Ume’s all-new vinyl reissues of these key
compilations fix some of those issues. “I Feel Fine” doesn’t have all that echo.
Liner notes that presumably first appeared in the CD reissues are included on
large cards. Naturally, the track line-ups remain the same because you just
don’t monkey that much with history unless your last name is Lucas and your
first name is George. That’s fine by me. After all, Rubber Soul is very good.

The big news for Beatles vinyl aficionados is that like the
recent Mono box set, the 54 mostly
stereo recordings on these new editions of 62-67
and 67-70 were culled from the
analogue masters, which means that you won’t hear the stereo mixes sounding
better anywhere else on new vinyl. They are louder and deeper than the digital
remasters from 2009, which you can hear on the Stereo box set or in much smaller doses on another compilation
newly issued on vinyl.

1 was released in
2000 as a budget solution to anyone who somehow managed to not be so enchanted
by the Fabs to want their entire output— or at least the more inclusive 62-66 and 67-70 collections. Gathering all the band’s British and American
number-one hits in one place is a logical approach to compiling The Beatles
onto a single disc, but it leaves some pretty brutal holes in the story while
making room for songs that simply aren’t among their very best. “All You
Need Is Love”, “The Long and Winding Road”, “Love Me Do”, and “From Me to You”
are here, but “Strawberry Fields Forever”, “A Day in the Life”, “In My Life”,
“Lucy in the Sky with Diamonds”, and “Here Comes the Sun” are not. Of course,
altering the concept for this vinyl reissue would not make a lick of sense, but
I’m not quite sure why Capitol decided to go with those 2009 digital remasters
instead of the analogue ones used on the “Red” and “Blue” albums. So for song
selection and sound, you’re way better off saving your pennies until you’re able
to afford the reissues of those 1973 collections instead of settling for 1 even if you’re barely interested in
The Beatles… unless you really want the full-size poster depicting picture
sleeves from around the world that comes with it, which I admit is really fab.

I’m not exactly sure who the audience for Love is. Is it for Beatles completists
who can’t stand the idea of not hearing their favorite band in every weird configuration
imaginable? Is it for people who don’t think The Beatles are that great and could use a
lot of unnecessary modernizing? I appreciate the amount of skill it takes to
make a “mash up” and George and son Giles Martin do pretty good jobs mashing
“Drive My Car” with “What You’re Doing” and “Come Together” with “Dear
Prudence” or whatever, but to my ears, Love
is really just a novelty to hear once and set aside before cracking back into Revolver for the 3000th time.
I suppose the fact that it isn’t just the same old songs in the same old
versions is what earned Love a spot
among the “canon” compilations while others—Rock
and Roll Music, Love Songs, Reel Music, 20 Greatest Hits, even Rarities—have
bitten the dust. Whatever the reason, this one is now on double vinyl for the
first time too.

Get Capitol/Ume’s new vinyl editions of 1962–1966, 1967–1970,
1, and Love on Amazon.com here:

Monday, January 5, 2015

France’s Yé-Yé girls were known
for singing—or often speak-singing—coquettish or girlish lollipop pop and
looking cute. Pussy Cat would have none of that. Her stage name was the only
cutesy pie thing about Évelyne
Courtois, a serious rocker who sang and played
guitar in France’s first all-female band, Les Petites Souris, and later drummed
in Les Pussy Cat. Moving outside of that band while taking along its name for
herself, Pussy Cat performed tough-ass, modish rock and pop, appropriately
debuting with a version of “Sha La La La Lee” (“Ce N’Est Pas Une Vie”) that
doesn’t hold back any of Small Faces’ bottom-heavy bash. Her attitudinal
singing has none of Bardot’s disaffected meow. Stand back when her rage boils
over on an electrifying cover of Betty Everett’s “You’re No Good” (“Mais
Pourquoi…”).

Having also cut tracks by and popularized by
The Hollies, The Moody Blues, Paul Revere and the Raiders, The Ballroom, and
Herman’s Hermits (okay…she does have her odd cutesy moment), Pussy Cat eventually
distinguished herself as a good songwriter in her own right in the late sixties,
though by that point she’d shed a lot of her Rock & Roll hellfire and went
in more of an emotive ballad direction. Nevertheless, her rock and pop roots
were still very detectable, as when she stole a bit of The Ronettes’ “Walking
in the Rain” for “Cette Nuit” or did a pretty good version of The Zombies’
“She’s Not There”.

RPM Records’ Boof! The Complete Pussy Cat: 1966-1969 collects all of Pussy Cat’s
sides for her first anthology released outside of France. A couple of
unreleased cuts and four Les Petites Souris sides that reveal Courtois had been
penning her own material as early as 1965 complete a revelatory portrait of one
of France’s most legit rockers.

I can’t for the life of me find the source, but I believe I
read at some point that there’s a scene in Dracula
in which the camera remains completely static for six excruciating minutes.
It’s the scene in which Mina talks with Van Helsing and Harker on an outdoor
lounge about 48 minutes into the film. Every time I re-watch Dracula, which I do at least once a
year, I watch the DVD counter during this scene, and every time it falls well
short of six minutes. Where do these rumors get started?

This was probably an exaggeration of a more well-traveled
accusation that has director Tod Browning allowing his camera to remain still
for three minutes in this scene, which is something that has been repeated by
no less a Dracula scholar than David
Skal. This is untrue too. A dolly-in occurs only seconds into the scene, and a
dolly-out ends it. Based on the way dollies frame the scene, it actually seems
pretty well planned out and not the lazy blunder a lot of film historians want
you to believe it is.

The same can be said of the entire film. While only a fool
would argue that the very first sound horror film featuring one of the all-time
iconic performances in any genre is not historically important, a lot of
critics still argue that Dracula is a
slow, talky, music and camera movement-devoid, overacted, underacted, dated bit
of piffle that front-loads its only worthwhile scenes in the first two reels.
Such criticisms always irk me, because Dracula
is my favorite film from Universal’s golden age of monster movies that wasn’t
directed by James Whale. I don’t find it slow. I think its “talky” script is
swollen with quotable lines. I think Bela Lugosi and Dwight Frye give two of
the great horror performances, and I love how the relative lack of music
contributes to its atmosphere of quiet, eerie dread.

The bad rep Dracula
has developed throughout the years also really irks film historian Gary D.
Rhodes. He backs up his belief the film has been unfairly and ignorantly
maligned with a mountain of evidence in his new book Tod Browning’s Dracula. Rhodes knows you can’t get too scientific
about opinions; if someone doesn’t like a movie, they don’t like it. But he
proves that a lot of the reasons critics give for disliking Dracula are simply wrong. Rhodes compares
the film to twenty other specimens released around the same time and concludes
that its use of camera movement, music, and dialogue are not unusual for its
day. This holds true when held against George Melford’s Spanish-language
version of Dracula, which historians
regularly rate as superior for its more active camera. This is an easy conclusion
to repeat, but far more tedious to check. Well, Rhodes did the tedious work, counting
the number of camera movements in both films, and guess what… Tod Browning’s Dracula has the more active camerawork and in a far tighter timeframe.

And speaking of Browning, Rhodes is making another point
with the title of his book. The author refutes the rumors that Browning barely
directed the film, that cinematographer Karl Freund did all the directorial
work. He also challenges the often-repeated notion that the film is a faithful
adaptation of the Balderston-Dean play and the gossip that Universal never
wanted Lugosi for its star.

The misinformation surrounding this film is staggering, and
it has sadly played a major role in lessening its standing as a great film. I
really hope that will start to change with the publishing of Tod Browning’s Dracula. Thisis a superior piece of cinematic
detective work and a great example of what one can accomplish when one simply
does his or her homework. I’m not sure if it will make any of Dracula’s multitudinous haters
reevaluate the movie for the better, but I sure hope they’ll at least stop using
lies to rake it over the coals. Rhodes’s book is apparently the first
installment of Tomahawk Press’ new series about classic horror films. I can’t
wait for the next one, and I hope it is written with the same care, attention,
and sense of purpose as Rhodes put into his book.

Sunday, January 4, 2015

Sweden’s The Shanes were absorbing British influence even before
The Beatles took their homegrown pop international in 1964. The previous year The
Shanes got started as a Shadows-type instrumental band, but started yelping
into mics and surfing the Mersey Beat in ’64. Their output that year had an
R&B beat but a light approach that was more Beatles (for whom they opened
in Stockholm) than Stones. In 1965, they toughened up a lot for some really
wild records, such as “I Don’t Want Your Love”, a crazed lift of The Kinks’ early
power chorders,“Crazy County
Hop”, which has some of the most eardrum-piercing harmonica squealing on
record, and a live version of “Roadrunner” with fiery guitar that would do
Townshend or Beck proud. This was The Shanes’ most powerful period as evidenced
on Let Them Show You: The Anthology
1964-1967, the band’s first compilation released outside of Sweden. The
punchy, maraca-rattling R&B in the center of this disc—much of it pulled
from the sophomore LP, The Shanegang—
is its bread and butter. The Shane’s odd return to lighter, 1964-style pop in
the psychedelic years is a bit confusing and considerably less satisfying (they
even rip off Herman’s Hermits with “Chris Craft No. 9”), but there’s still
stuff to dig in this period, particularly the moody chamber pop “Like Before”.

Thursday, January 1, 2015

It seems like yesterday that Psychobabble hit 900 posts and
I posted my very personal 90 favorite songs of the sixties. The next 100 posts
went by faster than a convoy of macramé big rigs chugging Billy Beer. Don’t
know what I’m talking about? Then you didn’t live through the seventies…not
even for the pretty brief period I did. Since I was so young at the time, the
decade is a bit of a blur of colors (brown, orange, and puke green) and pop culture
litter: Star Wars, “The Incredible
Hulk” with Bill Bixby and Lou Ferrigno, Jaws,
“WKRP in Cincinnati”, Grease, “The
Muppet Show”, Saturday Night Fever, “Welcome
Back, Kotter”, Dynamite Magazine.
Then there’s the music I remember hearing constantly: Barry Manilow, Starland
Vocal Band, Bread, The Carpenters, John Denver, Paper Lace, Anne Murray, The Eagles.
But hey, it wasn’t all shit. Hearing a bit of the good stuff by Wings,
Fleetwood Mac, or Elton John brings me back to the decade of my youth as
assuredly as a sip of Kool-Aid from a C-3PO Dixie Cup. And as I grew up, I
discovered all the truly great music that lived elsewhere from the AM dial.
Here are 100 of my personal faves gathered tidily in the 1000th post
here on Psychobabble!

100. “Do Ya” by
The Move or Electric Light Orchestra

We begin with a nod to the Choose Your Own Adventure Series, a staple of school libraries from
1979 on. You are drifting through an arena, surrounded by a fog of doobie
smoke. Two doors face you. Which will you choose? Walk through the door to your
left, and get your ears blown out by the rampaging Rock & Roll of Roy
Wood’s The Move. The sounds pouring through the door to your right are
impeccably polished by ex-Move man Jeff Lynne and buoyed by the swooping
strings of E.L.O. Unlike a Choose Your
Own Adventure book, you will not end up toiling in the salt mines of your
giant ant overlords if you pick the wrong door. Either way, you will end up
rocking to the mighty “Do Ya”, and either way, it’s dynamite.

99. “Telegram Sam”
by T. Rex

There’s no choice this time, because only one man can pick
out the slinky riffs sneering over the driving beat of “Telegram Sam”. He is
Marc Bolan, and this marriage of nonsense nursery rhymes and white-hot Les
Paul-stroking is one of his most magical conjurations. Where can I get me a
pair of automatic shoes?

98. “Whole Wide World”
by Wreckless Eric

Marc Bolan wants nothing more than to have a good time all
the time. Wreckless Eric has more global goals. He wants the girl of his
dreams, and he’s will to walk the Earth endlessly to get to her. Songs don’t
come more romantic without getting sappy.